On Tuesday we had this dish that consisted of miso butter wafu (Japanese style) pasta with cabbage and Chinese style three cup tofu.
The pasta dish recipe can easily made to be vegan by using tofu, so I thought I try this promising looking Chinese tofu dish with it and yes, it worked. 😋 My tofu had been frozen twice und defrosted before cooking to make it soak up even more sauce.
I wanted to have more green asparagus and since we all loved the Thai curry with it the other day, I had another go at this dish. I presented it differently this time and I think it works much better this way. Yum!
Today’s food was wafu style pasta with garlic, shichimi togarashi, konbu cha, and parsley. The whole kitchen smelled of the carefully sautéed garlic, so appealing!
Since there weren’t a lot of vegetables involved with this one I decided to add some chiffoned baby spinach leaves and also to have namase, a daikon and carrot salad, with it. When getting my plate ready, out of a whim I simply put my salad on top of the pasta, the others copied this, and we all agreed it tasted really good that way.
Germans like asparagus, but not so much the green stuff but lots and lots of white asparagus. Growing up I was never too much of a fan, it was edible but nothing that I would want to cook myself. Until I discovered green asparagus in the UK. I’ve loved it since and I think it’s much easier to deal with than the white spears. It also features in East Asian cuisine, so what’s not to like!
Photo 1: As it’s asparagus season I have made fried green asparagus with a Thai style red curry from an actual Thai curry paste (not one of those limp versions sold in German supermarkets for three times the price). It was spicy despite a whole tin of coconut milk but oh so good. For a while Thai food was my favourite go to East Asian cuisine in restaurants and this dish reminded me of those days. 🥰
Photo 2: Yesterday we had an East Asian style mushroom dish that was fine but not that exciting. But it definitely contributed to my plan to eat more than 30 plants a week. I have kept track since Monday and can report that the total is now at 54 different plants which I didn’t quite expect.
Are you familiar with Japanese, or better, Okinawan Fu? It looks like sliced white bread and in a way that’s what it is, but it’s made entirely of wheat gluten. In Japan it’s used to make all sorts of cooked dishes. I really should have taken a photo of the little bread slices before cooking them as it’s completely unrecognisable in my dish after I cut it into 1 cm cubes and soaked it in egg. We quite like it.
The dish I made is called Fu Chanpuru, which essentially means Fu with something mixed (in this case stir-fried). I loosely followed a recipe but replaced the sausage with rehydrated shiitake mushrooms, the fish based dashi with shiitake dashi (to make it vegetarian), and also added some chiffoned baby spinach and a little leftover shredded Napa cabbage.
As I had too many bean sprouts, I used the rest of them as salad with a leftover dressing of sesame oil, red wine vinegar, soy sauce and sugar.
At the end I decided that I also wanted a mashed up pickled plum with me rice, as I like the tangy kick from it. My husband opted for red cabbage kimchi instead.
Since there was still some of my tomato sauce in the fridge and I wasn’t too happy with my efforts yesterday, I tried making sweet & sour sauce from it again. It was definitely worth it!
While the rice was doing its thing, I went back to the basics and only fried green peppers with red onions. I mixed the sauce ingredients in a small saucepan and heated them up. Those items stayed on low heat and had to wait while I made some Chinese street style tofu slices (I had prepared the ingredients for that first). At the very end I put potato starch mixed with water into my sauce, to thicken it slightly. I served everything up. Yummyyyy!
Recipes used: https://www.copymethat.com/r/rRH3dBtlo/vegetables-with-sweet-and-sour-sauce/ https://www.copymethat.com/r/WF39ZbMLy/fried-tofu-chinese-street-food-style/
The last two days we had roasted vegetables, made fresh each time. Since I had run out of Ras-El-Hanout, I used various types of Harissa spice blends and added a few elements of the REH mix. It worked very well.
Yesterday it was cauliflower with potatoes, red onion and chickpeas. Today I didn’t have any more potatoes so I used parsnip, carrot and fennel. Half an hour in the oven and we had perfection.
Since I had seen a roasted fennel dish with Parmesan cheese by @LifeTimeCooking I decided to add the cheese today as an option and for the heck of it some roasted pine nuts too.
I can only say, people, eat more roasted vegetables with Mediterranean spice blends. You can’t go wrong!
#Tesco have stopped selling these #vegetarian Mushroom Rice Bakes. Does anyone in know of anything similar? They're so delicious and mushroomy, but we've just eaten our last packet of them.